A video series documenting how to build a natural home from designing, building and finishing, utilizing Permaculture principles and taught by expert natural builders. Learn everything, hands on from building a rocket mass heater, to timbre framing, to working with cob, and earthen plasters, straw bale building, off grid water and energy production systems and more!

Over the last week, we have had Anna Himmelmann, a friend and Mud Girl, originally from Germany, and Cabot Lyford, our neighbour from our previous address in Vancouver and great gardener came up to visit us at the farm and lend a hand getting the gardens built. What a help they were!!! We are so thankful to them for their gracious help and really enjoyed the company for the last week. Here are the latest bunch of videos that I shot over the last week showing the gardens coming together. Enjoy!

So its been a productive last couple of weeks here at the farm, for me, mixed between working in the office (transferring film) and working around the property. Several projects were started and some even finished!!! Anyway. We are loving being here in the woods. Plants are growing. water is flowing and the sun is shining. Here are a few of the projects that we have been working on this spring. Continue reading →

So I spent a few hours with the excavator working on an idea to give us gravity fed water to our gardens by way of damming up a small runnoff creek that comes in at the highest point on our property, creating a pond and using that to feed a line that will run all the way to our gardens. After I finished the initial dig (I still have to bring in more material and expand the berm and enlarge the pond) I built our first hugelkulture bed near the driveway on the first small plateau as you drive in, using a lot of the waste that was left by the loggers years earlier. here is a short video showing some of the results. Thanks for reading and watching!

Permaculture – a whole system approach to design and implementation of systems to live with/by/on. This means gardens, food forests, water, energy, shelter, etc… By this method we are shaping our property and our lives. Its wonderful. But practitioners of permaculture principles are by their nature, “preppers”… not “the sky is falling, terrorists are gonna take over types”… but people that would rather be prepared for an uncertain future and never have anything come to pass than be unprepared and have the world around us (as a result of natural disasters or enviromental changes or for economical or political reasons) collapse.Continue reading →

We just got back from a great, although cold trip to Germany and happy to be home at the farm.
Meike was gone all of March and I left on the 20th for the last 2 weeks of the trip, expecting it to be warmer there than here at 1100 meters in snow… I was mistaken. Not prepared for the blistering coldsnap that was blanketing most of Europe (I guess I could have looked at a weather report before heading off…) I only brought spring cloths with me… Regardless it was a fun few weeks shared with family and friends, and I even got a rugby game in with a team I play with in Holland.

Aside

So, finally we are online with the website. It will grow. New information on what we are up to, as well as what we are planning will be posted here and on our facebook group. We are trying to get this page up to date and as such, we will begin posting several galleries of our last summers work.

We are: Oliver and Meike Glaser and our two beautiful kids Emil and Eva.
So here is what we have been up to in the last year.